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PASTOR GENERAL'S' REPORT, AUGUST 14, 1981
PAGE 15
me every Sunday. Your ministry excites me and feeds me, and I long for
more understanding.
Mrs.
c.s.
(Don Mills, Canada)
I was watching Mr. Herbert Armstrong's show on Sunday morning when he
advertised a new booklet called, THE BOOK OF REVELATION UNVEILED AT
LAST. I am extremely interested in the book of Revelation, and so is
our youth Bible study group. Would you mind sending twenty copies of
the booklet so I can distribute them to the youth group?
G. T. (Flynn, Australia)
ON THE WORLD SCENE
STRIKE! STRIKE! STRIKE! "In the last days," the apostle Paul told Timothy,
"men will be lovers of self, lovers of money...arrogant•.•ungrateful" (II
Tim. 3:1-2, RSV).
What better description of our end-time industrial societies? Never before,
it seems, has the air been so filled with labor unrest. Today's strikes are
not the same as in decades past, with demands revolving around improved work
conditions, safety, health care, etc. Today's disruptions smack of pure
greed and selfishness!
�
Professional baseball players in the United States, for example--some earn
ing a million dollars a year--walk off the "job" in protest over the issue of
free agency {wanting the freedom to freely jump teams in order to bid sala
ries up still higher}.
It is in the field of governmental employment (so-called "public servants"}
that the real problem centers today. "Strikes against the people" have be
come commonplace in the past two decades, especially on the state and local
level--from teachers, to nurses to garbagemen, to firemen, police, parole
officers and countless other categories. Public transit employees strike,
forcing higher fares, cuts in service (yet in Boston, for example, employees
of the transit system--drivers and mechanics, etc.--earn $23,000 a year--up
to $50,000 with overtime!}.
On the federal level, the most outstanding example is the current strike
by
air traffic controllers. These government employees are compensated for
their at-times stressful and demanding jobs with average earnings of $33,000
a year plus overtime, placing them among the highest paid of all U.S. federal
workers (the average federal wage is about $21,500). A beginning controller
need only have a high school education, not a college degree, plus three
years of general work experience. He or she is trained by the federal gov
ernment and then starts up a career ladder that provides rapid promotions
and raises more generous than those given the typical federal worker.
The contract offer the controllers rejected would have provided each worker
with additional pay of about $4,000 a year. But they wanted a $10,000 raise
for each employee, whether he or she earned $15,000 or $49,000 a year--mean
ing pay raises of from 20 to 67 percent!
President Reagan, for the sake of principle, to say nothing of preserving
his economic reform program, had little choice but to refuse to reopen nego-